I recently came across a new paper co-authored by John Ousterhout, one of the original authors of the Raft protocol. In it John, and his co-author, describe an approach which can double the throughput of some popular replicated distributed key-value stores.

I’m not old enough to remember Jimmy Carter in office, but I did see him speak once in 2013. With a B.Sc., and some training in nuclear power, his background was always somewhat interesting to me — particularly how someone with a technical education approached politics at the highest levels.

Monitoring — the measurement of your system, the gathering of telemetry, and alerting when it behaves anomalously — is key to running large-scale, modern computer systems. But what many developers today don’t realise is that monitoring can be a key part of your design cycle too.

Hashicorp recently released version 1.0 of their Raft consensus package. The Hashicorp implementation, along with SQLite, forms the core of rqlite. rqlite has now been ported to release 1.0 and will be a key change in the upcoming release of rqlite 5.0.

After almost 20 years in the San Francisco Bay Area, I am moving to Pittsburgh, PA, to accept a management role with Google. I am very much looking forward to working at a world-class software company.

It was a great two years at Percolate, and I wish all my old colleagues there the very best.

This is the third in a series about core data structures and algorithms.

The outstanding characteristic of binary search is that it’s intuitive. Many algorithms are not, but binary search is what people — anyone, not just programmers — naturally execute when looking for an item in a sorted data set.

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Philip O'Toole

Summary

My name is Philip O'Toole and I am an experienced software engineer from Ireland. Based in the Greater Pittsburgh area, I have a particular interest in all things related to software development, particularly Linux system software, databases, distributed systems, and SaaS platforms.